Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/51

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One can only exclaim: "If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" An example of this kind at least brings home the fact that if in many ways the work of the older scientific societies is well advanced in its emancipation of the mind from obsolete ideas, the work of our Society has scarcely begun. We start, be it remembered, where physical anthropology leaves off; since to folklore is allotted the high task of tracing the course of man^s mental development. Justification of this claim is supplied by the materials which come within our province. They are to be included under the broad term "superstitions," all of which are, or have been, operative upon conduct. The history of superstitions is included in the history of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ plasm of which all beliefs above the lowest are the modified products. Belief incarnates itself in word or act. In the one we have the charm, the invocation, and the dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. "A ritual system," Professor Robertson Smith remarks, "must always remain materialistic, even if its materialism is disguised under the cloak of mysticism." And it is with the incarnated ideas, uninfluenced by the particular creed in connection with which it finds them, that the folklorist deals. His method is that of the biologist. Without bias, without assumptions of relative truth or falsity, he searches into origins, traces variations, compares and classifies, and relates the several families to one ordinal group. He must be what was said of Dante, "a theologian to whom no dogma is foreign." Unfortunately, this method, whose application to the physical sciences is unchallenged, is, when applied to beliefs,